As someone who loves to bake and eat as many baked goods as possible (I have a tolerance for sugar that some people might call disturbing), one of my favorite parts of wedding planning so far has been the cake tastings! We made sure to do most of these before Mr. Guinea Pig left for California so he would get to try the cake samples, and I think I can safely say it’s been his favorite part of the planning, too! Before we get to the insides of the cake though, let’s talk about how we want the cake to look.
Mr. Guinea Pig and I both love buttercream frosting and I strongly dislike fondant, even though I love the smoothness it gives to a cake. Mr. GP thinks fondant makes cakes look fake. So that was easy decision #1: buttercream frosting. Easy decision #2 was the shape – we both like the more traditional round, centered tiers with no crazy angles. We’re also both more inclined to do a simple cake with real flowers decorating it instead of anything too busy. Here are a couple of the photos in my inspiration gallery that we’ll be taking elements from (there are soooo many cake designs I love, it was hard to narrow it down)!
(I LOVE this cake – image found at Project Wedding)
The cake above is the perfect foundation for what we want: round, centered tiers with a blue ribbon at the base and a dot pattern! To add oomph to the design though, we are considering a slightly more intricate dot pattern, and we want to add real flowers to it like on this cake:
(cropped from this photo)
We haven’t decided yet if we want a cake topper (since there are so many cute options!), or if we will just use fresh flowers to top it off. I would love love love to have a cake almost exactly like this:
(How cute are those birds?! Photo found at PW again)
The flowery vines working their way up the sides of the cake! The perfect colors! Not to mention, the adorable birds on top. However, Mr. Guinea Pig much prefers real flowers to fondant/icing flowers, and I’m happy to have a lovely burst of color on our cake! The one thing I was sad to discover we could not do after choosing buttercream frosting for the outside of the cake is a quilting pattern.
(Mrs. Cupcake’s cake!)
See the pattern on the bottom and top tiers? It’s an indentation in the fondant, and buttercream can’t really pull that off so I had to let go of my dream pattern. At first I thought maybe we could recreate the pattern on top of the buttercream with piping but that looked more like netting than a quilted pattern. I also considered an awesome piped pattern like this:
(also, Project Wedding)
However this was a busier look than what Mr. Guinea Pig was hoping for, and I don’t like the design as much as the look of a more simple dot pattern. If we weren’t going to have a ribbon at the bottom of each tier, I would totally go for this look:
(again Project Wedding!)
It looks like champagne bubbles bubbling up the cake! But I think it looks weird if you have a ribbon at the bottom of the tier, and we really wanted to pull in some color that way. So, our cake will look like a combination of images 1 and 2, with a yet-to-be-determined cake topper! I’m so excited. 
Where we’re getting our cake and what it will taste like will come in a later post, but here are some of the other cake photos I loved so much that I couldn’t resist posting:
(Style Me Pretty – I seriously have 15 saved images of cakes with cute flowers like these)
(from Style Me Pretty – the perfect yellow color, and what a great design!)
(The black color reminds me of bats, but I think it would be gorgeous in blue and yellow! source)
Okay, this could go on forever! What are your favorite places to look for cake inspiration? Do you want your cake to be simple, or bold?
This article was originally posted onWeddingbee.
